I’ve seen a bunch of “SOA is dead” articles floating around, but you’ve gotta love the helpful diagram on this one!

However, I do agree that it would be great to never have another “what’s the best ESB?” or “WS-* vs. REST” debate again; they’re right up there with vi vs. emacs, where to put my curly braces, where we should go for lunch, and should-I-listen-to-you-or-just-shoot-myself-now?

Seriously though, why do people see things in such absolutes? There is always a new thought advancement just around the corner, and in this case I think it’s absolutely SaaS, cloud computing, and in general leveraging “the grid” to get powerful, aggregate functionality from a bunch of different (and cheaper) sources instead of building it all on one mega-architecture somewhere. Big changes in software thinking don’t come out of geek think tanks, they evolve organically out of lots of lots of little pieces. A component of this will always be Big Coporation’s IT strategy, but add to that today’s tight budgets and the abundance (and acceptance) of using the internet for “everything” and you get a clear trend towards life in the cloud.

Instead of worrying about whether [insert your favorite acronym here] is deprecated you might as well get used to change, because it isn’t going anywhere.